Front side (obverse) of the Nobel Prize Medal for Physics presented to Edward Victor Appleton in 1947
The Nobel Prize in Physics (Swedish: Nobelpriset i fysik) is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of physics. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel (who died in 1896), awarded for outstanding contributions in physics.[1] As dictated by Nobel's will, the award is administered by the Nobel Foundation and awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.[2] The award is presented in Stockholm at an annual ceremony on 10 December, the anniversary of Nobel's death.[3] Each recipient receives a medal, a diploma and a monetary award prize that has varied throughout the years.[4]
Statistics
The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to 224 individuals as of 2023.[5] The first prize in physics was awarded in 1901 to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, of Germany, who received 150,782 SEK. John Bardeen is the only laureate to win the prize twice—in 1956 and 1972.
William Lawrence Bragg was the youngest Nobel laureate in physics; he won the prize in 1915 at the age of 25. He was also the youngest laureate for any Nobel prize until 2014 (when Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize at age 17).[6] The oldest Nobel Prize laureate in physics was Arthur Ashkin who was 96 years old when he was awarded the prize in 2018.[7]
There have been six years for which the Nobel Prize in Physics was not awarded (1916, 1931, 1934, 1940–1942). There were also nine years for which the Nobel Prize in Physics was delayed for one year:
The 1914 prize awarded to Max von Laue was announced only in November 1915.[9]
The Prize was not awarded in 1917, as the Nobel Committee for Physics decided that none of that year's nominations met the necessary criteria, but was awarded to Charles Glover Barkla in 1918 and counted as the 1917 prize.[10]
This precedent was followed for the 1918 prize awarded to Max Planck in 1919,[11]
Ioannidis et al. reported that half of the Nobel Prize for science awarded between 1995 and 2017 are clustered in few disciplines. Particle physics (14%), atomic physics (10.9%), and 3 non-physics disciplines are dominating the prize in recent decades. And then semiconductor physics and magnetics are the next most honoured physics disciplines.[18]
"for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons"
"for the invention of an apparatus to produce extremely high pressures, and for the discoveries he made there within the field of high pressure physics"
"for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles"
"for his decisive contributions to elementary particle physics, in particular the discovery of a large number of resonance states, made possible through his development of the technique of using hydrogen bubble chamber and data analysis"
"for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier, in particular those phenomena which are generally known as the Josephson effect"
"for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars"
"for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection"
"for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics"
"for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter, in particular to liquid crystals and polymers"
"for the achievement of Bose–Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates"
"for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider"
"for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics", in particular "for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses"
^ A. The form and spelling of the names in the name column is according to nobelprize.org, the official website of the Nobel Foundation. Alternative spellings and name forms, where they exist, are given at the articles linked from this column. Where available, an image of each Nobel laureate is provided. For the official pictures provided by the Nobel Foundation, see the pages for each Nobel laureate at nobelprize.org.
^ B. The information in the country column is according to nobelprize.org, the official website of the Nobel Foundation. This information may not necessarily reflect the recipient's birthplace or citizenship, and instead reflect their academic or scientific affiliation at the time of receiving the award.
^ C. The citation for each award is quoted (not always in full) from nobelprize.org, the official website of the Nobel Foundation. The links in this column are to articles (or sections of articles) on the history and areas of physics for which the awards were presented. The links are intended only as a guide and explanation. For a full account of the work done by each Nobel laureate, please see the biography articles linked from the name column.
^"Why Nobel-Winning Scientists are Getting Older". Priceonomics. 10 April 2015. Archived from the original on 11 October 2022. Retrieved 6 October 2022. Though Bragg is no longer the youngest Nobel Laureate of all time — Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize this past year, at age 17 — he is still the youngest in the sciences.
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